Nanotechnology

The two
leading think tanks addressing the transhuman
implications of nanotechnology and nanomedicine are:

Foresight Institute
(Palo Alto, California, USA) The base for Eric Drexler
and a network of people working to bring about Drexler's
vision of molecular manufacturing and nanobots.
http://www.foresight.org

Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
(New York City, USA) A group working to promote
anticipatory public policies to ensure that molecular
manufacturing is safe and widely available.
http://www.crnano.org

AI Convergence with Human Intelligence

Hans Moravec
and Nick Bostrom concisely make the argument for
imminent human-level AI in these essays:

Ray Kurzweil. 2000. "The Law of
Accelerating Returns."
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html

Richard Dawkins. 2002. "The next fifty
years: science in the first half of the 21st
century" in The Next Fifty Years: Science in the
First Half of the 21st Century. Ed. John
Brockman. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Chapter 2: Controlling the
Body

Robert
Freitas' series of Nanomedicine tomes are the
place to start for would-be nanoengineers, but he has a
full bibliography with links to shorter pieces that are
more accessible introductions to some of the possible
applications like robotic white and red blood cells:
http://www.rfreitas.com/NanoPubls.htm

Coalition
for the Advancement of Medical Research (CAMR)
A lobby organized to defend stem cell research and
regenerative medicine, composed of patient
organizations, universities, scientific societies,
foundations, and individuals with life-threatening
illnesses and disorders.
http://camradvocacy.org
http://stemcellfunding.org

Futurist and
artist Natasha Vita-More has also pulled together a
number of ideas about the posthuman body into an
engaging web presentation at: http://www.natasha.cc/primointro.htm

An important
place to start for criticisms of germinal choice would
be:

References

Holen A. (1995): "The
history of accident rates in the United States", in:
Simon J. L. (ed.) (1995) The State of Humanity
(Blackwell, Oxford).p. 98-105.

Manton KG, Gu X. 2001.
"Changes in the prevalence of chronic disability in the
United States black and nonblack population above age 65
from 1982 to 1999" Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A.
2001 May 22;98(11):6354-9.

Ann Elwan. 1999. Poverty and
Disability: A Survey of the Literature. December,
1999 by The World Bank Social Protection Team.

Chapter 3: Living Longer

The best ways
to stay in touch with radical life extension news is to
subscribe to the daily or weekly email bulletins from
Betterhumans.com and perusing the work collected at
these longevity-oriented sites.

InfoAging.org
A site sponsored by the American Federation for Aging
Research, providing comprehensive information about
aging from a mainstream scientific point of view.http://infoaging.org/

Some summaries
of the lines of research that will lead to radical life
extension, and a proposal for how to bring them all
together, can be found in Aubrey de Grey's website for
"SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence)"
at: http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/

There has also
been a backlash from aging researchers against life
extension hype. They don't buy the idea that
accelerating, or even linear, progress will make life
expectancies of more than 100 possible. Dozens of
researchers signed on to a pessimistic statement "The
Truth of Human Aging" published in Scientific
American in 2002, and then Stephen Hall took a whack
at the field in Merchants of Immortality.

James Halperin, 2000. The First
Immortal. A novel that explores cryonic preservation
and some of the challenges a cryonaut would face on
resuscitation.

Hughes, J. 2000. "The Future of Death:
Cryonics and the Telos of Liberal Individualism"
Journal of Evolution and Technology. How will
cryonics be effected by the ongoing redefinition of
death?
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume6/death.htm

British
behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin is one of the
leading researchers whose work is suggesting a limited
set of genes which influence intelligence. A place to
start would be his recent article:

Plomin, Robert and Frank M. Spinath.
2004. "Intelligence: Genetics, Genes, and Genomics,"
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
January, 86(1).

Chapter 5: Being Happier

Dutch
sociologist Ruut Veenhoven's World Database on Happiness
website is at
http://www.eur.nl/fsw/research/happiness/, and it
includes an extensive bibliography on the social
correlates of subjective well-being.

For the
inheritability of a happiness set-point a place to start
is David Lykken's 1999 Happiness: What Studies on
Twins Show Us about Nature, Nurture, and the Happiness
Set Point (Golden Books Adult Publishing).

Magnetic Stimulation Studied as
Alternative to ECT for Depression. The National
Institute of Mental Health, November 9, 1995. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/events/prmagrec.htm;
Internet; cited July 10, 2000.

Chapter 6: Biopolitics

Liminality, Anomie and Future Shock

My reflections on the role of liminality
and future shock in shaping the bioLuddite response are
inlfuenced by two classic anthropology texts

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and
Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual
Process. Chicago: Aldine.

Political Axes

This four-fold
schema of political ideology is derived form the
empirical work done by William Maddox and Stauart Lilie,
reported in their 1984 Beyond Liberal and
Conservative: Reassessing the PoliticalSpectrum
(CATO Institute).

U.S. President's Commission For the Study
of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and
Behavioral Research. 1983. Deciding to Forego
Life-Sustaining Treatment: A Report on the Ethical,
Medical, and Legal Issues in Treatment Decisions.
Washington, D.C.

Chapter 7: Cyborg Citizenship

Polygeny and Racism

Rajeev Balasubramanyam makes the
important point that the distinctions between polygeny
and monogeny were actually irrelevant, since most
monogenists, such as Darwin, also believed in the
biological inferiority of blacks. They believed this
inferiority had evolved after Africans and Europeans
diverged from a common human ancestor, rather than
having been present at Creation or from animal origins.

Human-Racism,
Personhood Theory and Citizenship

Joseph
Fletcher's book Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical
Ethics (Prometheus Books, 1979) is one of the most
important and seminal pieces on personhood ethics. A
more recent and explicitly transhumanist argument for an
expanded concept of legal personhood is found in Linda
MacDonald Glenn's piece "Biotechnology at the Margins of
Personhood: An Evolving Legal Paradigm" available at:
http://www.jetpress.org/volume13/glenn.html.

Brain Death and Personhood

Extra-uterine gestation and fetal personhood

Tooley,
Michael. 1984. Abortion and Infanticide. Oxford
University Press. Classic argument for the
non-personhood of the fetus and newborn.

Kuhse, Helga
and Peter Singer. 1985. Should the Baby Live - The
Problem of Handicapped Infants. Oxford University
Press. Argues that the non-personhood of the newborn
should warrant a greater flexibility for parents to make
treatment decisions for handicapped newborns.

Bailey, Ron.
2003. "Babies in a Bottle" Reason August 20. A
recent review of technical progress toward extra-uterine
gestation, and its political repercussions.
http://reason.com/rb/rb082003.shtml

Keenan, Julian, Dean Falk, and Gordon G.
Gallup. 2003. The Face in the Mirror: The Search for
the Origins of Consciousness. Harper Collins.
Summarizes research on the self-awareness of great apes,
humans and other animals.

Posthumans and Machine Minds

McNally, Peter
and Sohail Inayatullah. 1988. "The Rights of Robots."
Whole Earth Review (Summer): 2-10. Suggests that we
will have to redefine our concept of rights to admit the
possibility of robotic personhood.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0265.html

George Annas, Lori Andrews and Rosario M.
Isasi. 2002. "Protecting the Endangered Human: Toward an
International Treaty Prohibiting Cloning and Inheritable
Alterations" American Journal of Law and Medicine
28(2002): 151-178.

Yandava, Booma D., Lori L. Billinghurst,
and Evan Y. Snyder. 1999. "Global" cell replacement is
feasible via neural stem cell transplantation: evidence
from the dysmyelinated shiverer mouse brain.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America. 96(12):7029-34.

Snyder, Evan Y. et al.
1997. "Multipotent neural precursors can differentiate
toward replacement of neurons undergoing targeted
apoptotic degeneration in adult mouse neocortex."
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the
United States of America. 94:11663-8.

Regarding the effect of castration on
longevity, fortunately this team has now discovered that
they can achieve the same effect by knocking out a key
gene without making the worms sterile. Humans appear to
have the same gene, so we may also be able to double our
lifespans without castration or hysterectomy. See:

The
Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity(Chicago, USA) led by conservative Christian
bioethicist John Kilner, chair of ethics at Trinity
International University to which many religious Right
bioethicists have ties.
http://www.cbhd.org/

Ramsey, Paul. 1975. Fabricated Man:
The Ethics of Genetic Control. Yale University
Press. Methodist theologian Ramsey was one of the
foundational writers in bioethics and a Christian
opponent of germinal choice.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith. 1987. "Respect for Life: Instruction on respect
for human life in its origin and on the dignity of
procreation" issued February 22, 1987. Vatican statement
which condemns all genetic manipulation of the embryo
since it likely involved invitro fertilization, doesn't
respect the embryo and might lead to transgenic
creatures.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfhuman.htm

Pontifical Academy for Life. 1997.
"Reflections on Human Cloning." A Vatican statement on
cloning.

Council for Biotechnology Policy. 2002.
"The Sanctity of Life in a Brave New World: A Manifesto
on Biotechnology and Human Dignity." A manifesto,
signed by many leaders of the U.S. Christian Right,
stating that humans have dignity (souls) from conception
to death, and that there should be an international
treaty to forbid cloning and inheritable genetic
modification to protect that dignity.
http://www.thecbc.org/manifesto.html

Secular Conservative bioLuddites

President's Council on Bioethics
(Washington D.C., USA) chaired by Leon Kass, the many
background documents and testimonies archived at the
site are a comprehensive primer on the religious and
secular opposition to human enhancement technology,
which has been the PCB's principal focus under Kass.
http://bioethics.gov

___. 2002. Life, Liberty and the
Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics.
Encounter Books. Kass' most recent statement of the need
to stop life extension and human enhancement in order to
protect human "dignity" from human liberty

Turning Point Project,
directed by neoLuddite theorist Jerry Mander, program
director of the Foundation for Deep Ecology. The
Turning Point Project was founded to launch a nationwide
campaign in 1999, involving more than 100 environmental
and progressive organizations, attacking "technoutopianism"
species extinction, genetic engineering, economic
globalization, industrial agriculture and
nanotechnology. http://www.turnpoint.org/

Resources

Some of the key deep ecological
bioLuddite texts are:

Devall, Bill and George Sessions. 1984.
Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered.
Peregrine Smith Books. The classic statement of deep
ecology philosophy.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1995. Rebels
Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the
Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age.
Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. A good history
on the original Luddite movement, and statement of core
beliefs of the modern Luddites.

Kaczynski, Ted. 1996. The Unabomber
Manifesto. Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber on his
terrorist bombing spree, specifically addresses the
alleged threat to freedom from human genetic
engineering, and insists that the only way to stop it is
to destroy industrial civilization including modern
medicine.http://www.unabombertrial.com/manifesto/

Kimbrell, Andrew. 1998. The Human Body
Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life.
Regnery Publishing, Inc. Kimbrell's most recent
statement on the threats from biomedical capitalism.

Joy, Bill. 2000. "Why the future doesn't
need us," Wired, April.
Joy's defection from being a leader of the cybernetic
revolution to the being a prominent advocate of the
"renunciation" of genetic, nano and cybernetic
technologies was a bracing wake-up siren for complacent
technoutopians. Although he is not a deep ecologist, his
article is a classic argument for technology bans on the
basis of potential apocalyptic risks.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html.

McKibben, Bill. 2003. Enough: Staying
Human in an Engineered Age. His title ably sums up
the argument of the book - he's satisfied, and doesn't
see any point in making things better with technology,
especially if it means becoming posthuman, which he
thinks is risky.

Chapter 9: Left-Wing
BioLuddites

Society for
Genetics and Society
(Oakland, California, USA) led by long-time left
activist Marcy Darnovsky and the former assistant
political director for the Sierra Club Richard Hayes.
Dedicated to stopping "techno-eugenics" and banning
cloning and inheritable genetic modification.
http://genetics-and-society.org

Council for Responsible Genetics(Boston, USA), once more narrowly focused
on genetic patents and public safety issues, but now led
by Rifkinite Board which has signed on to a broader
anti-biomedical agenda including stem cells and
therapeutic cloning. Founded 1983.
http://www.gene-watch.org/

Left-Right Synthesis BioLuddites

Institute on
Biotechnology and a Human Future Most
disturbing of all is this new Chicago-based thinktank,
headed up by former left-libetarian bioethicist Lori
Andrews and Christian Right bioethicist Nigel Cameron.
They have recruited leading Christian Right bioLuddites
such as Christopher Hook, William Hurlbut, C. Ben
Mitchell, Paige Cunningham and Kevin Fitzgerald; leading
deep ecologist bioLuddites Andrew Kimbrell, Brent
Blackwelder and Stuart Newman; and leading left-liberal
bioLuddites George Annas and Judy Norsigian.
http://www.thehumanfuture.org

Hubbard, Ruth and Elijah Wald. 1997.
Exploding the Gene Myth. Boston: Beacon Press.
Argues that genetics won't accomplish as much as people
expect, and that the focus on genetic therapy distracts
from needed social problems.

Winner, Langdon. 2003. "Are Humans
Obsolete?" An extended critique of the mysanthropy and
elitism of the libertarian transhumanists, and a call
for a more left-wing technopolitics, open to
technological progress but sensitive to social reform
and inequality.
http://www.rpi.edu/~winner/AreHumansObsolete.html

ETC Group. 2003. The Strategy for
Converging Technologies: The Little BANG Theory.
March/April. Argues that innovation on human enhancement
should be stopped until the world is made more equal.
http://www.etcgroup.org/article.asp?newsid=378

Renaissance and Enlightenment
Transhumanism

Early Twentieth Century Transhumanism

Wells, H.G. 1898. The Time Machine.
A classic dystopian reflection on how class inequality
might lead to subspeciation of the human race.
http://www.bartleby.com/1000

Haldane, J. B. S. 1924. Daedalus or
Science and the Future. New York: E. P. Dutton &
Co., Inc., 1924. The classic essay by one of the
founders of modern genetics on the future use of
extra-uterine gestation and other technologies, which
inspired Huxley's Brave New World.
http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Daedalus.html

Bernal, J. D. 1929. The World, the
Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the
Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Speculates about
space colonization, bionic implants and mental
improvements.
http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Bernal

Stapledon, Olaf. 1930. First and Last
Men. A boring book which projects many future
posthuman possibilities.

Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World.
San Bernadino: The Borgo Press, 1989. The classic
anti-transhumanist critique of the dehumanizing and
authoritarian possibilities of transhuman technologies,
such as mood drugs and extra-uterine gestation.

Post World War Two Transhumanism

Sterling, Bruce. 1985. Schismatrix.
Arbor House. A novel that imagines transhumanism as a
political philosophy uniting a diverse posthumanity.

FM-2030. 1989. Are You a Transhuman?
Warner Books.

Regis, Ed. 1990. Great Mambo Chicken
and the Transhuman Condition. Perseus. An upbeat
gonzo journalistic account of some of the pre-extropian
transhumanists.

Alexander, Brian. 2003. Rapture:How Biotech Became the New Religion. Basic.
Focuses on the parallel growth of the transhumanist
subculture, and the gradual realization of biotech
pioneers that the biotech revolution might make radical
life extension possible. Ends before the emergence of
the WTA.

Human Evolution, Reproductive Technology
and Germinal Choice

Fletcher, Joseph. 1974. The Ethics of
Genetic Control. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1974,
pp. 147-87. Fletcher made some of the first arguments
for genetic choice, although he included a very
problematic side argument for the creation of subhuman
servants.

Glover, Jonathan. 1984. What Sort of
People Should There Be?: Genetic Engineering, Brain
Control and their impact on our future world.
Penguin. A defense of human genetic engineering that
makes the distinction between therapy and enhancement,
but accepts that enhancement could be ethical.

Robertson, John. 1994. Children of
Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies.
Princeton University Press. One of the most important
statements of the case for procreative liberty, stopping
short of germinal choice.

Savulescu, Julian. 2001. "Procreative
Beneficence: Why We Should Select the best Children"
Bioethics, 15(5/6). Argues that parents have an
affirmative obligation to select the child, among the
possible children they could have, who will have the
best life. Includes a defense of selecting non-disease
genes.

____. 2003. The Path to Posthumanity.
Goetzel, a serious AI researcher who is deeply involved
in the AI/Singularity subculture, takes a friendly swipe
at Extropian misanthropy in this excellent on-line book
in "Chapter 15: Extropian Elitism and Humanist
Posthumanism."
http://www.agiri.org/path/

TechnoFeminism and Harawayan Cyborgology

The three most
important feminist utopian novels all use reproductive
technology: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 Herland
depicts a woman-only society that reproduces with
parthenogensesis. Joanna Russ' 1975 The Female Man
depicts a woman-only society in which women reproduce
with parthenogenesis. Marge Piercy's 1976 Woman on
the Edge of Time depicts a utopian society which
uses artificial wombs and a dystopian society in which
gender differences have been genetically enhanced so
that women have been virtually enslaved.

Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The
Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
William Morrow. Argues that women will never be free of
patriarchy until artifical wombs free them from having
to carry babies.

After
Haraway's Manifesto, which can be found in a dozen
places on the Web, the next most important review of
early cyborgology is Chris Hables Gray's edited 1995
volume The Cyborg Handbook (Routledge) a
collection of dozens of essays on cyborgs and Harawayan
social criticism. Haraway's 1997 Modest_Witness@
Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_Oncomouse
(Routledge) is distinctly more ambivalent about
technology as a vehicle for human liberation.

Haraway,
Donna. 1984. "The Ironic Dream of a Common Language for
Women in the Integrated Circuit: Science, Technology,
and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s or A Socialist
Feminist Manifesto for Cyborgs" Socialist Review
80:66-80. The somewhat opaque essay which launched the
field of cyborgological culture studies. It argues that
feminists should reject a dualistic view that associates
men with culture and technology and women with nature,
and instead embrace the cyborg as a liberating
transgressive icon for women who would integrate the
power of technology into themselves.
http://www.rochester.edu/College/FS/Publications/HarawayCyborg.html

Gray, Chris
Hables. 1995. The Cyborg Handbook, Routledge,
London, NY. A collection of essays on cyborgs, from
Kline and Clynes through the cyborgologist culture
critics.

____. 2001.
Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age.
Routledge. A thorough, though rambling, reflection on
the relationship between technology and politics in the
coming transhuman age.

Progressive Defenses of Germinal Choice and Reproductive
Technology

Wicker,
Randolph. 2000. "The Queer Politics of Human Cloning."
Gay Today, March 20. Randy Wicker is a veteran
gay rights activist and founder of the Clone Rights
United Front. He argues that gay rights and the right to
use reproductive and genetic technology are
intrinsically linked.
http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/tech/032000te.htm

Advocates of Universal Access to Enhancement
Technologies

Resnick, David. 1997. "Genetic
engineering and social justice: a Rawlsian approach"
Social Theory and Practice, Fall 1997 v23 n3
p427(22). Argues that genetic engineering can and should
be used to promote social equality.

Dworkin, Ronald. 2000. Sovereign
Virtues. Harvard University Press. Dworkin argues
that the best way to develop the fullest liberty of
citizens, which is the obligation of society, is to
provide a general equality in the resources necessary
for equal opportunity, including universal access to
genetic enhancement.

TechnoGaianism and Existential Threats

Amongst the
substantial literature on the various existential risks
to humanity there are a number of notable writings. A
recent, short and very readable review of the variety of
human and natural existential threats is Martin Rees'
Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror,
Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's
Future In This Century--On Earth and Beyond (2003,
Basic Books). Rees appeals for us to take threats
seriously in order to protect our posthuman future, not
prevent it. Similarly, transhumanist writer Nick Bostrom
extends the concept of existential risk in his 2001
essay "Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction
Scenarios and Related Hazards" (available at
nickbostrom.com) to include "whimpers" such a
super-totalitarian Borgification of the human race which
closed off all possibility of a diverse and expanding
posthumanity.

Anderson, Walter Truett. 1987. To
Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the Political
Animal. Harcourt Brace. Anderson argues that we have
no choice but to learn to democratically govern
evolution, both of the planet and of the human race.

Mulhall, Douglas. 2002. Our Molecular
Future: How Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Robotics,
Genetics and Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Our
World. Prometheus Books. A thorough statement of "nanoecology"
and look at the ways molecular technology will help us
prepare for and prevent natural and human-made
disasters.

Rees, Martin. 2003. Our Final Hour: A
Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and
Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In
This Century--On Earth and Beyond. Basic Books.
Rees lays out the various threats to the future of
humankind, including human technologies, ecological
destruction, and cosmological catastrophes.

Wagar, Warren.
1992.
A Short History of the Future. University of
Chicago Press. A very readable vision of the building of
a global democratic order that makes human enhancement
technology universally available.

Fighting Body-Based Oppressions and Discrimination

National
Organization of Women
The leading feminist organization in the United States.http://now.org/

International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
The leading international lobby for transgender, as well
as gay and lesbian, rights. http://www.iglhrc.org/

National
Transgender Advocacy Coalition
The leading US lobby for transgender rights.
http://www.ntac.org/

Expanding Rights to Control Our Mind

Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics
A nonprofit education, law and policy center working in
the public interest to foster freedom of thought and our
right to control our own brains. Their issues include
the right to use drugs and other brain technologies, and
the right to brain privacy from technologies such as
"brain fingerprinting."www.cognitiveliberty.org/

Democratizing Technological Innovation

Union of Concerned Scientists
A more ecological and left-wing science lobby.
Produced the "Scientific Integrity in Policymaking"
report critical of the Bush administration. http://ucsusa.org/

Genetic Alliance
An international coalition of individuals,
professionals, and genetic support organizations working
on genetic-based diseases, research, insurance,
Medicaid, genetic support groups, and disability
resources. Opposed to genetic discrimination.
http://www.geneticalliance.org

Alliance for Aging Research
Leading coalition working to support therapeutic cloning
and stem cell research in the US.http://agingresearch.org/

Creating Global Solutions

Annas, George. 2000. "The Man on the
Moon, Immortality and Other Millenial Myths: The
Prospects and Perils of Human Genetic Engineering"
Emory Law Journal, 49(3). Annas says that not all
species-altering technologies need necessarily be made
crimes against humanity. But he insists that none should
be permitted until their consequences can be considered
thoroughly by a representative international democratic
body, and voted on. Since we don't have such a body
yet, Annas is willing to accept the United Nations in
its place. Nonetheless he says that, in his view, all
these species altering technologies should be banned.
http://www.bumc.bu.edu/www/sph/lw/pvl/html1.htm